Gripping It!

My first memory of Geto Boys' Grip It! On That Other Level comes from burning my buddy’s CD collection. They made it into my CD player by having the grace to have ‘Assassins’, covered by the Insane Clown Posse (a rap group so ludicrous, not only do they believe in magic, they do not believe in electromagnetism). So when I found an album put out by these guys that got a shout out by someone I was willing to follow into hell (or, Detroit, as the case may be), I figured I’d give them a shot.

Turns out I thought they sucked, and so I only jammed them when I needed an interlude in between Biohazard and Perfect Circle.

With music tastes that confusing and conflicting, it’s a wonder I’m still alive today.

One neat thing about the album is that it’s pulp; you can't take it seriously. Like pulp-fiction (the genre) everything is exaggerated. The protagonists are not just murderers, they’re rapist thugs with a perplexing level of psychological problems that went curiously uncorrected by granny’s switch or momma’s ‘tussin during their youth. They don’t just bang hos, they bang them until their body looks like swiss-cheese and then give her over to their boys while they go and get another. And they don’t just sell drugs; they are, in fact, made of drugs.

While the esteem of the artists is somewhat enthralling, it doesn’t remove a greater fault – that it all sounds the same. It’s not just the 4/4 beat, with keyboard wounds added in for effect, high snare and low bass. It’s not just the monotonous delivery (from all except Scarface). It’s not just the Godfather/Scarface samples. It’s all that… and the fact that you can probably take any 4 bars from any song, put them into another song, anywhere in that song, and have it fit seamlessly.

Example: contrast the following from ‘Read These Nikes’:

When I hit ya in your goddamn mouth
And show you what a real nigga's all about
When I dispose of your ass like waste
And nothin but my shoe is in your muthafuckin face

With the following from ‘Size Ain’t Shit’

So if you wanna try your luck
C'mon...play pussy'n'get fucked
Asshole snicker and get beat
Your a bad motherfucker if you dare to compete

It’s like they only had enough creativity between the three of them for four songs- ‘Do It Like a G.O.’ (not a typo), ‘Let a Ho be a Ho’, ‘Mind of a Lunatic’, and ‘Seek and Destroy’. The first is your quintessential thug-anthem, the second is a comedic rendition of how easy pimpin ain’t, the third is a long flirtation with horror-core, and the last is… a lot like the first, but with Scarface unafraid to experiment with tempo.

They strung those four songs into twelve.

On a closely related note, last week I reviewed the song ‘Scarface: Pt. II’ off The World Is Yours. Pt. I is on Grip It!, and is, in fact, the exact same story. Scarface deals some raw, raw-dogs a girl, is shot at during the act, grabs his ratchet and goes Vietnam Tom on some enemies. Both were good to listen to; Scarface has a talent for exaggeration and self-aggrandizement that is nothing short of demigodly. Although, if this actually keeps happening to him, he should probably stop. And if not, why make up the exact story twice? For a fan of The Godfather, Scarface sure forgot to make the sequel an improvement.

On a one to ten scale, I give this album a rating of ‘Power Rangers’. It’s from the early 90’s, its violent, its filled with some fucked up noise, but not enough to give an erection to the kids who’re into that sort of stuff. But mostly, ‘cuz its just the same shit over and over. It’s not a complete waste - millions of kids loved that show before they grew up enough to realize it was one of the worst television shows ever. And Amy Jo Johnson was smoking. And the Green/White/Rainbow ranger actually uses his morphin-super-powers when he’s in the octagon.

Morphenomenal!